Not Much Watching Movies: Graduate Film School

February 27, 2012

A lot of conservative people think that I got my M.A. by sitting around watching movies, when in reality, it was mostly reading/researching, writing about, and discussing philosophical and ideological theories. I took one undergraduate course on 16mm film production, and it was a film production in which I got a C because the film lab supervisor, who really didn’t like me and alleged that I ogled female classmates in excess, “accidentally” forgot to get my film shoot cleared with campus security.

It was not often that we saw complete feature-length films in class, and often short films, such as Andy Warhol’s Blow Job and Todd Haynes’s Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story were shown to us only in excerpt.

I also got a private screening of F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans on LD for an independent study, but it ran over, and I had to watch the remainder on a bad VHS copy.

In an undergraduate 16mm filmmaking course I took, we saw one of the instructor’s films. I was not impressed. I’d list it by title and the instructor’s name, but I can’t remember either. It showed a bunch of people in Central Park in slow motion with a lot of heavy breathing from sweaty runners.

If I remember one or two others that we saw (I don’t currently have access to my old syllabi–they’re in a box in a storage unit, and not organized), I’ll add them, but this is the majority of the in-class film screenings that we had over a period of four semesters in which I was a full-time student.

My personal favorites were Peggy and Fred in Hell, Sunrise, Elephant, The Smiling Madame Beudet and To Die For.

I think overall there was a big clashing of tastes. The professors were predominantly interested in audience analysis, and so wanted us writing about Hollywood blockbusters from a snooty point of view of “the rabble.” They didn’t seem to like any of my film choices, no matter how I tried to fit them into the ideas of the course. These included The Medium (Gian Carlo Menotti, Alexander Hamid, 1951) [for the authorship course], The Force Beyond (William Sachs, 1978) [for the nonfiction media course], The Hidan of Maukbeiangjow (Lee Jones, 1973) [for the ideology course], Oz (Chris Löfvén, 1976) [for the history course], His Majesty, the Scarecrow of Oz (J. Farrell MacDonald, 1914) [for an independent study], and What’s the Matter with Helen? (Curtis Harrington, 1972) [for cinema and gender]. I should say that they did like what I did the first year, and then treated me contemptuously the second year, as if they were bored with me. Although I think my work improved, my grades started dropping to B+s with really vague explanations. For the paper on What’s the Matter with Helen?, I was told that I needed “greater focus, and depth, and precision.”